Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
As long as it needs to be to tell the story-- no longer, no shorter.
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Yes... and imho, about 50% of longer novels are longer than they need to be.
Also, I don't mind arbitrary word limits for unproven authors, again, if an author can't tell a decent story at 60-80K words, they are probably not going to be able to tell one at 200K words.
I found the comment about short fantasy novels lacking something kind of interesting, if for no other reason than the fact that some of the seminal authors in the early days of the genre spent much more of their efforts on shorter fiction. Howard wrote mostly short stories, and only one of his Conan stories counts as a novel. Likewise, Fritz Leiber wrote a lot more short stories...
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Bill